The present invention relates to a methodology for expediting the handling of print job output in the output bin of a printer. In particular, the present invention relates to where a shared printer places banner sheets with the desired printout in the output bin.
Sharing of resources has become an integral part of the typical day-to-day business operations scenario. In particular, printers of greater cost and which offer such attributes as higher speed, better resolution or color are shared. However, this means that the printed hardcopy output in the shared resource is often provided in a limited number or even a single output bin. Most printers designed for resource sharing accommodate this problem in a few ways. Typically the printer will skew or offset entire print jobs from each other. Often a banner or header page is inserted as a separator sheet between the print jobs. Examples of this are found in U.S. Pat. No. 4,211,483 to Hannigan et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,316,279 to Corona et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,547,178 to Costello, and U.S. Pat. No. 5,709,374 to Taylor et al., which are herein incorporated by reference in their entirety for their teaching.
Banner pages have long been associated with print jobs in shared print environments. A banner page is, typically, a printed sheet that separates one print job output from another. For example, a banner page may include the name or some other uniquely identifying feature of the user that submitted the print job, often in an eye-catching format, so that the user can easily find and separate his/her print job from the other jobs in the printer's output tray.
Traditionally, the use of banner pages has been relatively narrow in scope and purpose, reflecting the capabilities and intended use of the shared printers. For example, one banner page has typically been output on top of (or in association with) each print job submitted. If multiple copies of a particular job are requested, then multiple banner pages may also be produced. Essentially, the only option available has been whether to print the banner page with the job, or not, and even that option is not adjustable by the user because it is pre-designed at the shared print server that spools the print job to the printer.
The problem with banner pages of course is that they create waste. Often as soon as a print job is picked up the banner page is discarded. If only one sheet of paper needed to be printed, the addition of the banner sheet represents 50% waste. Furthermore, it's not unusual for the banner page to create some delay in the completion of a print job when the printer must receive the banner information from the server. See U.S. Pat. No. 6,075,617 to Fisher et al. which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety for its teaching. One example of this delay is a Xerox Document Centre ColorSeries 50 when connected to a LAN. If a user is present to retrieve their print job, they must wait for a banner to print they don't need. In addition there are consumables such as toner or ink which are also wasted with banner sheet printout.
Therefore, as discussed above there exists a need for a methodology which will solve the problem of print delays due to banner sheets and the waste they create. Thus, it would be desirable to solve this and other deficiencies and disadvantages with an improved methodology.